“From the City to the Valley.” This transit map reflects the modern reality that “Silicon Valley” has grown to include the entire San Francisco Bay Area.Credit: Stamen Design

In downtown San Jose, the cavernous, cool ZERO1 Garage is the conceptual epicenter for a wide-ranging art exhibition. Seeking Silicon Valley is an artistic exploration that includes 100 exhibits at 45 museums, galleries, and studios across the Bay Area.

Jaime Austin is one of the curators. Forty years ago, “Silicon Valley” referred to a small clutch of high tech companies in the Santa Clara Valley. Today? “It’s a network of freeways, a network of people, a network of technology, a network of companies and a network is something fairly abstract,” Austin says. “Silicon Valley, at least to me, is really more of an idea, than it is a place.”

Austin stands in front of what looks like a Bay Area public transit map — except the transit is anything but public. It’s a map of corporate bus routes that more than 44-thousand people use to commute to Google, Apple, Facebook and the like. The map (by Stamen Design of San Francisco) is jaw-dropping for its size and complexity — and for what it says about the way Silicon Valley has grown over the last 40 years.

“You know, the idea of San Francisco and Silicon Valley being two different types of cities with two different types of industry is no longer true. The greater San Francisco Bay Area is now interconnected. Because we really are one giant ecosystem.” Austin says.

“That’s one place where government can be a driver — is in providing some sort of guarantee for markets that we think are crucial and that won’t exist otherwise.”

That ecosystem is also one of the nation’s biggest economic drivers. Like it or not, Silicon Valley has a relationship to cultivate with government. Internet industry analyst and author Larry Downes says some of the most intractable political issues trickle down as big business problems across the world of High Tech. Take for instance, patent law.

“The patent system is utterly and completely broken,” Downes states flatly, “and I don’t know a single person in Silicon Valley, whether they’re a beneficiary or a victim — often both — who doesn’t think otherwise.”

Immigration law is another pain point. Downes points to one example: the best and brightest come here to California to study at our universities, up to the point they’re ready to start working here.

“That’s the moment at which we say ‘You have to leave the United States and go do it in another country.’ I mean, it’s insane!” he says.

More broadly, there’s a vast cultural gulf between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC. Even now, a dozen years into the 21st century, there are members of Congress who boast about how clueless they are.

Last year, Downes covered the debate over SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act, a Congressional measure stopped by an upswell of protest from people and companies concerned about its impacts on the digital realm. Many of those impacts were either unintended or not fully thought through. The bill was largely a creature of lobbyists for the entertainment industry, and many Congressmen were simply taken aback at the public response to the bill.

Downes was in the audience for the hearings. He was shocked at some of what he heard come out of the mouths of some representatives. “‘Well, I don’t really understand the Internet,’ or ‘Well, my daughter uses this device and it sounds very interesting.'” Downes pauses for effect.

“I mean, not only do they not understand these products that we build,” he says, “They don’t even feel compelled to pretend they understand the products!”

The way Downes sees it, government should just stay out of the way.“We built a government that couldn’t do things quickly, because we wanted to make sure that when government acted, it acted carefully and with due deliberation. Of course, that’s a terrible fit for businesses or for technologies that change every 12-18 months. The pace is such that everything you want government to do — even if they did it, it would be too late by the time it arrived.”

Downes recently articulated these views in a commentary for Forbes. But even he admits that what high tech companies want from government depends on what kind of high tech they do. A software developer working on a smart phone app may view government’s “help” more like interference. For companies in other tech industries — med tech, biotech, green tech, clean tech — the view may be quite different.

Priv Bradoo is co-founder of Blue Oak, a venture-capital funded start up that aims to tackle toxic e-waste by grabbing phones and laptops on their way to the landfills of Asia, then extracting the precious metals inside for sale. Sipping on a can of Red Bull in the dappled sunshine outside the company’s offices on Sandhill Road, Bradoo says “I don’t think the government’s in the business of picking winners, but it should be in the business of facilitating and improving and increasing the access to resources that aren’t easy to be funded using small private investment.”

Bradoo says her company would like to build one of their refineries in Southern California to do that extraction. The trouble is, labor, utilities and taxes are more expensive here than in other states. If state and local governments were to sweeten the deal, that might change the math.

“Absolutely. I think it all comes into what are the incentives for us to be here, versus somewhere else,” she says.

Because at some point, Bradoo’s going to have to make the case to her venture capitalists.

“From the investors perspective, that’s usually a big question,” she explains. “Is it going to take two years to put up? We’ve done as much as we can do without actually setting up a facility. Hopefully we can find places where it’s not going to be a problem, but it’s actually even the perception of a regulatory risk which can be a hinderance.”

Beyond that, Blue Oak is going to burn through its VC cash, and the firm will find itself competing for real — inside a system that essentially off-shores the human and environmental cost of e-waste to people in China and India.

Blue Oak Co-founder Bryce Goodman says it matters that the U.S. is not a signatory to the Basel Convention, an international anti-toxic waste dumping deal, and that we don’t mandate companies to take back used electronics on a nationwide basis. Without those kinds of policies, the volume isn’t there to make recycling much of a business proposition in the U.S.

“That’s one place where government can be a driver — is in providing some sort of guarantee for markets that we think are crucial and that won’t exist otherwise,” Goodman says.

Whether their business model relies on a tight relationship with government – or relies on government staying out of the way – one thing is for sure: Silicon Valley denizens don’t leave their relationships with government up to chance anymore. Big companies hire their own lobbyists. Little ones band together in collective lobbying associations, like EngineAdvocacy in San Francisco. This is, after all a democracy, and if you don’t participate, you don’t get a say in what happens.

For Election 2012 The California Report has been hitting the road to talk to voters in various parts of the state — previously we’ve visited Riverside and Fresno. Today we turn to Silicon Valley. You might think the famously entrepreneurial business culture of Silicon Valley naturally fosters Republican sentiments, but the Republicans we talked to say they’re wandering in the political wilderness.

The Santa Clara County Republican Party recently held a fundraiser for Johnny Khamis, the GOP-endorsed candidate for San Jose City Council District 10. About 25 people showed up to rub shoulders over platters of hors d’oeuvres from Costco. If Khamis were to win, there would be two Republicans on the 10-member council.

“I go knocking on doors in my precincts every day,” Khamis tells me, “and some of them will ask me straight up: ‘Are you a Republican or Democrat?’ And I tell ‘em, ‘It’s a nonpartisan race.’ And then they say, ‘So what are you? A Democrat or a Republican?’ And I say, you know, ‘I’m a Republican,’ and if it’s a Democrat, a lot of them will, um, slam the door in my face. Occasionally. OK, not a lot of them. But occassionally. It happens.”

“The Republicans in California have to completely recast the party or they’ll be in a permanent minority.”

Here in Santa Clara County, Republicans account for just 23 percent of registered voters. Compare that with 30 percent statewide. It’s fair to say Republicans are feeling outnumbered in many parts of California, but Helen Wang of San Jose says she feels like she has a target on her forehead.

“That’s how I feel,” she says, laughing. “Because usually nobody supports me at all.”

And that’s even despite Wang being a social liberal, like many Republicans in California.

Wang may feel the anti-GOP sentiment more acutely because she’s active in the local party, but even rank-and-file Republicans can feel tempted to lay low.

Attorney Boris Feldman of Palo Alto says he’s used to being the token Republican in the room, which is ironic, given that his exposure to Silicon Valley has a lot to do with why he became one in the first place. He grew up a liberal Democrat in South Bend, Indiana, and has spent the last 26 years representing technology companies in shareholder lawsuits.

“Business is very different out here — probably the best hope of our country economically,” he says. “And it just started to change how I looked at things like government regulation and government involvement in the marketplace.”

The 57-year-old loves so much about the Bay Area: the appetite for risk, the willingness to fail early and often, the easy embrace of diversity, the sheer ambition to change the world for the better.

“There’s so much to be grateful for in living here,” he tells me. “On the other hand, we’re living in a bankrupt state that’s completely controlled by groups that get their money from the state. The teachers’ unions, the prison guard unions, other unions. They own this state.”

But after watching Republicans Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina faceplant — politically speaking — in the election two years ago, Feldman stopped giving to the California Republican Party.

“It would be almost devastating for me to go home at Thanksgiving. Like, ‘Hey, Grandad. Yeah, I voted Romney.’ And…being 92 years old, I think he might just drop dead.”

“I’m going to need to see a way out of the wilderness before I start donating to them again,” he says. “The Republicans in California have to completely recast the party or they’ll be in a permanent minority.”

Like Wang, Feldman is also a social liberal. He blames the party’s conservative social platform for turning off his voting friends who might otherwise choose the GOP. Feldman has given $2,500 dollars to Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency, but these days, he mostly gives to his Orthodox synagogue in Palo Alto. “You get much more satisfaction giving to a local organization where you can tell it’s going to make a difference than you do in giving to another politician who’s robo-dialing.”

Mitt Romney may not collect a lot of votes in the San Francisco Bay Area, but he is collecting a lot of money here. Romney has made repeated trips to Northern California, making sure to stop in wealthy enclaves like Hillsborough. For die-hard Republicans, Romney is the candidate to stand behind — whether or not this ticket is doing anything to grow the GOP party locally, the way Feldman would like.

Jeff Whitlow might be one of those persuadable voters Feldman talks about. Whitlow grew up in what he describes as an upper-class household in Michigan. He went to private schools. He went to Stanford. “I never went to public school a day in my life,” he confesses.

Today, Whitlow, 24, lives in San Francisco and works in Foster City at Bailard, an investment management firm that caters to people Silicon Valley made wealthy. Many of his clients, he says, are Republicans. Many of his friends are Republicans. His heart is with the GOP — even though his family is True Blue.

“You gotta support the black president because you’re black,” says Whitlow, who is African American. “It doesn’t really make sense when you verbalize it. They’re very proud to have a black president. But … the party doesn’t necessarily represent their best interests.”

Whitlow voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and the pressure is on for him to do it again. He wants to vote for a Republican president. But he feels he can’t do it this year — not given that social conservative Paul Ryanis on the ticket and not given his family back in Michigan. So Whitlow’s thinking of voting Republican “down ballot.”

“It will likely be a split ticket, because it would be almost devastating for me to go home at Thanksgiving. Like, ‘Hey, Grandad. Yeah, I voted Romney.’ And he would probably, being 92 years old, I think he might just drop dead.”

And you’d be remembered for killing your grandfather, I point out.

“Exactly. I don’t want that weight on me for the rest of my life!”

Whitlow expects to be taking a lot of phone calls from his Grandad between now and November 6. But come 2016, Whitlow’s vote for president may well belong to the GOP.